


A Stronger Word Than "Friend"

by PhazonFire



Category: RWBY
Genre: Absolute fluff and nothing else, Before all the bad stuff happens lmao, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Kinda, Mechanical Rose, Mutual Pining, Nuts and Dolts - Freeform, Penny has an emotional inferiority complex, Pining, Teaching a Robot to Love, Volume 7, Wingman Pietro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23151520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhazonFire/pseuds/PhazonFire
Summary: When she thinks about Ruby Rose, Penny has a hard time understanding the new emotion she feels.
Relationships: Mechanical Rose - Relationship, Nuts and Dolts, Penny Polendina/Ruby Rose
Comments: 5
Kudos: 94





	A Stronger Word Than "Friend"

**Author's Note:**

> Finally not smut for once lmao

The magazines made it look so easy, as did the comedies she’d often seen on the television in her father’s study. She understood the general concept, objectively, like a math problem viewed from afar, with a logical answer resting at its end. An equation in and of itself: two humans, alike in desire and emotional drive, together as one, in a bond stronger than friendship. Where does that line blur, though? Is there a definite point of transition? Can it be felt? Or, at least, hinted at?

Penny sighed, closing the magazine in her lap. This was much harder than she’d thought. 

Many a night was spent distressed, her head in her hands yet unable to cry, only fueling her frustration. For all of her father’s commitment and adoration of his synthetic daughter, it was too far beyond the poor man to impart all the wisdom of the human experience unto an artificial girl. Penny was smart--strikingly so, despite what others had long classified as an “eccentric” personality: at her core, she was a machine, capable of quick, precise calculations, efficient development of combat strategies, and an adept, logical understanding of the world around her, its functions, and its history. She prided herself on growing talents in the field of human interaction, a subject of great difficulty for her over the years--after all, upon her initial conception, those in Atlas hadn’t been too keen to view her as anything but another war machine under military command. 

So she’d found her answer in Vale, and it made her metal heart sing.

Penny struggled each and every day with a sense of dread and inferiority, torn to bits (figuratively, for once) over her inability to grasp the depths of human emotion. Some concepts had come more easily than others: when Ruby left, she felt sadness. When she pictured Ruby coming to harm, she felt anger. When she pictured Ruby by her side, she felt elated, ecstatic, overjoyed, an indescribable sensation she had long since decided “happy” was too dull to explain. 

And when she pictured Ruby, period, she felt something else entirely. 

Her father had laughed heartily at her concerns, when she’d mustered up the courage to pour her heart out to him. She considered herself a friendly person--very friendly--and beamed when she would count her friends on both hands, too many companions to fit on her fingers alone. Yang Xiao Long, Blake Belladonna, Weiss Schnee, her new friends from Team JNPR, and one friend that felt too...friendly. 

“She’s my friend, and I’m her friend, but she’s not like my other friends, she’s my _best_ friend, and--well, at least I hope we’re best friends, because what if she doesn’t see us as _best_ friends, just regular friends? And when I think about her, I don’t feel... _friend_ -y, and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing, am I supposed to feel just _friend_ -y? Am I supposed to--”

“Dear girl, slow down a bit!” Pietro pleaded, motioning for calm with his hands. He leaned back in his seat with a chuckle. “These old bones can’t keep up. Let’s take things one step at a time, shall we?”

Penny’s facial sensors tingled--perhaps this is what humans felt when they blushed. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be, sweetheart. Now tell me in plain terms, dear, where is all this coming from? What’s troubling you?”

“It’s Ruby,” Penny blurted out, torn between embarrassment and urgent catharsis. “Something isn’t right, I feel strange when I think about her.”

Pietro raised an eyebrow. “Strange how?”

Penny looked down at her feet shyly, shuffling them in anxiety. “I feel like a friend when I think about her, but I feel like “friend” isn’t strong enough. When I think about Weiss, or Blake, or Yang, or even Miss Winter, I don’t feel this way. They’re my friends, but Ruby is like...an _extra_ extra friend. A super friend.”

Pietro beamed. “A super friend, eh?”

“Precisely!” Penny exclaimed, her motions erratic and animated. “Like a _super_ extra friend, but not a _best_ friend, more than a best friend! Like on the television, when those people are together all the time, and they hold hands.”

“On the television, you say?”

“Yes, on those funny shows you leave on in the study. And in the magazines in here, too! The pictures of people, when they do that thing where they touch their mouths together, and they look happy. Those kinds of super extra special friends.”

Pietro’s grin softened into something more tender, and a single tear of endearment welled at the corner of one eye; for all the things Penny had learned, he’d never taught her that. 

“My dear girl, that’s love.”

Penny’s eyes widened in a mixture of confusion and dawning realization. “Love?”

“You love that girl, don’t you, Penny? The one from Team RWBY, with the silver eyes.”

Penny’s heart felt hot, tinged with shame. “Is...is that wrong?”

As if sensing her distress, Pietro waved his hands frantically, as if to clear the air of the concern quickly settling over his daughter. “No, no, of course not! Love is a beautiful thing. A precious part of life, darling. It’s more than a friend, for sure. And that’s perfectly okay! It’s a feeling I always hoped you’d get to experience one day. It’s different from a father’s love, I’ll tell you that much,” he added with a hearty laugh. 

“I...love Ruby?” Penny murmured, testing the words on her lips. She was enamored with the sensation of forming the sentence, her heart swelling with an indescribable catharsis she didn’t recognize. “I love Ruby?”

“I’d be inclined to say you do! And I’ve seen that look in her eye, when she looks at you too. Why, I can remember that face she made when you two first saw each other again, when she first got to Atlas with her friends. There’s something there, I’ll bet. Who knows? Maybe she--”

“Loves me too,” Penny cut him off. “Maybe she loves me, too. Maybe she…loves me, too?” she tested aloud once again. The words felt foreign, confusing, difficult to process from a logical standpoint. But, at the end of the day, Ruby Rose wasn’t a logical person. She was sporadic, impulsive, creative. Radiant. Bright, shining, spectacular in every way. Just thinking about her, again, made Penny’s knees weak and her heart warm. The feeling, with this new label attached, did not serve to invalidate her friendship with Ruby, but rather supplement it, adding a new dimension to her emotional vocabulary with which she could process her perception of her dearest friend. Her heart surged with another pang of urgency--one she, in all her eccentricity, couldn’t keep to herself. 

“I have to go,” she spoke in a rush, sprinting towards the door of the study, her father’s gentle laughing at her back. She fumbled her way through the front door and out of the house, nearly tripping down the steps as she raced through the streets of Mantle with a singular goal. Her eyes scanned the roads frantically, hunting for each and every sign of that red cloak she’d come to adore the color of. In her haste and one-track determination, it had not even occurred to her to fly instead--something she would laugh at herself over later. She darted past dumpsters and trash cans, weaving in and out of each and every alley she could find, hurried “excuse me!”s lobbed at each and every passerby she encountered. Impatience was getting the best of her. 

“Ruby!” she called, desperately. “Ruuuuuby! Ruby! Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!”

“Penny? Are you okay?” a high-pitched voice called back in worry, just around the alley corner which Penny was rounding, at an unstoppable speed, too fast to halt, and--

As typically happened, now Penny was on the ground, face first into bricks and snow. Down with her came something softer, more delicate beneath her body. 

“Uuuugh, Pennyyyy,” the soft mass below her whined, shifting and squirming out from underneath her. “I thought you were in trouble, you scared meeeee.”

Penny hopped to her feet, extending her arms to a winded huntress glued to the pavement. “I’m so sorry, Ruby! I just needed to tell you something really, really important!”

“Really really _really_ important?” Ruby half-teased, reaching for Penny’s arms as she dusted the snow off of her shoulders with one hand. 

“Yes!” Penny squealed, before pulling Ruby up to her face in one swift motion, doing the one thing she’d seen on the television and in the magazines over and over again, each and every day. Whether she was doing it well, however, was up to chance. Ruby yelped slightly at the initial contact, her lips suddenly brought to Penny’s own without a moment of warning. Penny wrapped her arms around Ruby as they kissed, determined to never let go--although, typically, she was unsure of the general length of time this act usually went on for. She was content to never move again, if Ruby had not begun tapping her arm with urgency, stifled noises of distress escaping her lips. Penny released her grip, and Ruby inhaled deeply, gasping for air. 

“Oxygen, _oxygeeeeen_ ,” she whined, panting. With her breath regained, she looked up at Penny in confusion, her cheeks dusted a soft red in embarrassment as the nature of the past 30 seconds settled on her. “Wh..w-w-w...Penny, what--”

“I love you!” Penny exclaimed, beaming as she threw her arms into the air. “I love you as more than a friend! More than even a super _extra_ special friend! I love you, Ruby, I love you more than my heart can take!”

Ruby gazed at Penny in awe, eyes wide and practically sparkling as she touched her fingers to her lips absentmindedly. “You...love me?” Ruby murmured softly. 

Only then had Penny begun to consider that, for all her excitement, she was not fully confident in what was supposed to come next. Her bright smile faltered, and her hands lowered slowly from the sky. “I...I do love you, if it’s okay. It’s okay, right?” she spoke quietly, suddenly self-conscious about her actions. The same lingering sense of confusion and inferiority she’d come to dread each night began to cloud over her once more, and her eyes stung. “I...I’m sorry, I--”

With a blur of red, suddenly Penny’s words were gone, taken from her lips--no, pressed to her lips? Something pressed against her face, a soft sensation against her mouth, with two warm, gloved hands pressed to either cheek. Closed eyes met her vision, and her own went wide in turn. She froze, starstruck and unable to move in shock, as Ruby pulled away from Penny’s face with far less urgency than the time before, her silver eyes shining as they looked into Penny’s own. Ruby smiled softly, and Penny’s head spun, her heart absolutely overloaded with that familiar sensation she’d become obsessed with. When Penny moved her now-lonely lips to speak, words eluded her, and she could only offer staccato sounds of surprise. 

Ruby giggled. “Thought you’d never say it,” she breathed, intertwining her gloved fingers with Penny’s own on either hand, looking up at the synthetic girl in admiration. “What do you think about being “more than even super extra special friends” together?”

Penny’s heart absolutely sang, more than she could internalize--her love spilled out of her rapidly, a thousand yeses tumbling from her mouth as she pulled Ruby close, spinning her around in the middle of the alleyway, loudly and without a trace of the shame she’d been so anxious about each night. Ruby laughed, pleading playfully for mercy as she found herself trapped in Penny’s embrace, peppering Penny’s cheeks with kisses in retaliation. “She loves me back!” Penny cried into the open air, her entire soul alight with immeasurable bliss. “She loves me back, she loves me back, she loves me back!” 

The two girls laughed for what felt like ages, stopping only to pelt one another with fervent kisses before immediately being swept up in a mutual embrace yet again, the cycle repeating in the broad daylight of Mantle as the huntresses lost themselves in the bliss of their own newfound love. Penny felt immersed in Ruby’s radiance--and, in that moment, more human than she’d ever thought she was capable of being.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe I should go back to writing fluffy stuff more often damn


End file.
